The Phantom Tollbooth was a childhood favorite, as I believe I've told you before. However, I disagree that it lacks in symbolism or developed themes. Don't get me wrong - I don't expect children's books to be as complex as adult literary fiction either, but for a child's level, it's not just a whimsical story. It simply doesn't follow the script for fantasy themes. Funny that Voltaire is mentioned in that quote...because The Phantom Tollbooth has a similar style to Voltaire's Candide, IMO. Voltaire writes a frantic series of weird stuff happening (although I'd never call it fantasy), but there definitely is theme and symbolism at every point. It's not just quirky plot and characters for their own sake nor the hackneyed good vs evil theme (which so often is just a pale shadow of Biblical concepts). I find the wit of both pretty rare for the fantasy genre, but I don't think the presence of it means the points made are any less "serious". Lewis Carroll is another example of this, and more appealing to me than most fantasy also. I see your hero Tolkien seems to dislike satirical elements in "fairy stories" as well as use of dreams to explain the fantasy elements. But I actually like these elements, because they add depth to the story for me.
I only read parts of Candide; but I detect a very similar flavor and style to what you mention in
Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais: but from what you say, Rabelais is definitely more deliberately fantastical; and, yes, Voltaire was umm,...opinionated.
Lewis Carroll's wit for was exemplified in the poem You Are Old, Father William, although
Walrus and the Carpenter and
Jabberwocky come close; the sheer phantasmagoric-yet-ordered quality in the story was to me a type of literary foreshadowing of the
. And I was unable to detect any social commentary in Lewis Carroll's
Alice.
Did I detect a note of sarcasm in saying "your hero, Tolkien" ? I admire him for his verbal craftsmanship; the fact that the entire *world* he created had distinct species/races of creatures, each with their own history against a common historical backdrop; and the fact that he invented complete languages together with their own syntax/grammar/punctuation (he was a philologist by trade; *I* believe it shows compared to the names/places in most fantasy/sci-fi). [1]
...on re-reading, I see you mentioned this below already. (T'sk t'sk at myself.)
The Phantom Tollbooth has a little bit of the overdone fantasy element of "good vs evil" where some evil power is conquered at the end by some regular, simple person (dividing stuff into blanket good and evil sides is very annoying to me), but like Voltaire it's kind of satirizing the whole thing. The Phantom Tollbooth is iconoclastic on a kid's level. Most fantasy is actually seeking to reinforce these symbols, rather than challenge them. I know the flippant style of NP types doesn't always sit well with IxxJs (and it's clear Voltaire and Norton Juster are Ne-dom), but it's not just a series of witticisms. It IS painting a bigger picture, but they don't bother to connect the dots for people because the obviousness of that is very dull to an NP. Most fantasy genre hits you over the head with a sledgehammer regarding its theme and any symbolism it contains. These move so quickly from one silly situation to the next that you can easily miss the point each is making.
Indeed, this is true: and it agrees with my experience in reading
Tollbooth. I wasn't looking for themes, but instead loved the individuals: Tock, and laughing at the Mathemagician's Division Dumplings, and developing a schoolboy crush on the Princesses. I didn't notice the symbols until you pointed them out in this post (bows). But that to my mind, makes it all the better, because I resent "the purposed domination of the author".
The Phantom Tollbooth's real themes are about forming gratitude for the world around you and finding personal motivation and inspiration, as well as understanding what is true wisdom vs mere convention, which involves becoming aware of how arbitrary the world can be structured. This is almost opposite of most fantasy, which wants you to believe everything has some meaning, and that there is some fate you are woven into, that you are destined for a course, as opposed to you being a creative force and using your perceptive powers to discern principles, not needing to follow some spelled-out code or being confined to a particular path.
The character in PT is getting a sense of control over his perspective (and as a result, his reality) in every thing he encounters (not stuck in the doldrums - as a state of mind), and he learns he can find reality interesting because of his own creative ability. He sees there are many ways he can interpret everything and that things were only dull because he chose to be dull. He learns to remove assumptions.
At the outset, the lead character has no gratitude and difficulty finding anything to muster energy or enthusiasm for. It struck me as different from most fantasy because it doesn't have the hero themes at all nor is it about powers of good and bad, but it's about creative power and forming powers of discernment. Rhyme and Reason reign at the end - which gives the ability to give meaning to things, not simply joining some black and white side of good or evil. Everything is just a bunch of arbitrary facts without it, which is why the Kingdom of Wisdom is very silly until those two reign again. The main character feels and witnesses extremes of "rhyme" and "reason" throughout the novel, which also emphasizes the balance needed for both. What this book also does, similar to Voltaire but on a children's level, is make fun of the norms people take for granted, to reveal how absurd so much of it is. It's so anti-Si, it's hilarious to me. It's mocking conventional ideas of wisdom, morality, etc. In being "random", it's illustrating how very arbitrary human "order" and rules really are, that they've actually eschewed rhyme and reason.
"Forming gratitude for the world around you and finding personal motivation and inspiration" -- bull's eye. I had been about to protest that it sounded like a very INFP thing to say, until I recalled the book. You are completely correct.
"why the Kingdom of Wisdom is very silly until those two reign again" -- Rhyme and Reason, echoing, to my mind, the feud between the King of Dictionopolis and the Mathemagician...which echoes the sundering between the humanities and sciences in our day.
I must find time somewhere to read
Candide with your commentary in mind.
The fantasy genre otherwise strikes me as an e9 genre - escape from reality in the fantasy of the humble, regular person conquering some big bad force by being diplomatic and humble in working with others, but then developing backbone when needed. The theme is right on the surface and there is not much thought needed to suss it out. Everything I know about Harry Potter fits this.
As does
The Hobbit, and
The Lord of The Rings.
I liked fairytales as a child, but most are more like fables to me than a full blown fantasy epic. I do admire the work of creating a "whole world", but I don't think that in itself is captivating enough for me to really enjoy the genre.
The Narnia series has obvious symbolism, but I only liked them for the story. They didn't impact me because the themes felt obvious (very Biblical) and I had no perspective shift from it. I don't include them with my general criticism of fantasy though because I liked them and they are not favorites for reasons unrelated to my criticisms. As with most novels, I skim over very long passages describing action, especially warfare, and there is often too much of that in the fantasy genre for my taste.
Hmm, well...C.S. Lewis wrote of this himself,
"The Editor has asked me to tell you how I came to write The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
I will try, but you must not believe all that authors tell you about how they wrote their books. This is not because they mean to tell lies. It is because
a man writing a story is too excited about the story itself to sit back and notice how he is doing it. In fact, that might stop the works; just as, if you start thinking about how you tie your tie, the next thing is that you find you can't tie it. And afterwards, when the story is finished, he has forgotten a good deal of what writing it was like.
One thing I am sure of. All my seven Narnian books, and my three science fiction books, began with seeing pictures in my head. At first they were not a story, just pictures. The Lion all began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself: 'Let's try to make a story about it.'
At first I had very little idea how the story would go. But then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it. I think I had been having a good many dreams of lions about that time. Apart from that, I don't know where the Lion came from or why He came. But once He was there He pulled the whole story together, and soon He pulled the six other Narnian stories in after Him"
So these books were not explicitly allegory; and yes, I agree with you that they don't touch as much on *personal* themes, as they do on moral or societal ones;
and yet, and yet, what I think Lewis snuck into them was not morality, but classical Greco-Roman references -- fauns, satyrs, dryads, Bacchus, as well as the muttered quote from one of the Sleepers at the enchanted table, on the Island where Caspian meets his future wife, the star's daughter...:
"Weren't meant to live like brutes. Get to the East while you've a chance: lands behind the sun." I also wonder whether this line was an example of what gave Lewis a stab of what he described as Joy in his autobiography,
Surprised by Joy:
"It must have the tang, the stab, the inconsolable longing."
And THAT, together with the other lines in
Surprised by Joy,
"...I find myself exclaiming, 'Lies, lies! This was really a period of ecstasy. It consisted chiefly of moments when you were too happy to speak, when gods and heroes rioted through your head..."
make me wonder whether Lewis was really an INFP and not an INTJ after all.
I never liked Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, sorry - I know you're a huge fan. I think these books are more social in nature - they read almost politically to me (and I prefer something like Orwell for that). There's this personal quality lacking...perhaps they are not "psychological" enough. Most books I like have very little plot and deal with no supernatural or even extraordinary events (I believe you thought at first that Proust was writing about the lives of the social elite, which is not at all what Proust really wrote about & is a mere backdrop, but you later on saw that), but they are heavy on the exploration of the psychology of the characters & deeply rooted social dynamics, and in the end, they say a lot more to me about human nature and reality. I don't get a deep sense about human motivations in fantasy genre - they seem to espouse moral lessons and vague, general themes about human virtues and vices. Of course, there are varying degrees of talent in any genre, but generally I find fantasy to attract writers who are not as good as those in other genres and don't develop their themes (if any) so deeply. Harry Potter is prototypical for me, then, not any outstanding exception.
I agree that Tolkien's
The Lord of The Rings differs -- in that touches on larger scale, grander themes, as it were: but this was explicitly by design. Tolkien once wrote that England had no heroic mythos of its own (I presume he meant compared to the Germanic or Norse myths), and he wrote to try to create one. I don't recall him saying he disliked *sarcasm*, but he openly disclaimed that
The Lord of The Rings was parable: as he said,
"I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.â€
(This will tie into sci fi / fantasy as I will touch on below. Hat tip to [MENTION=5999]PeaceBaby[/MENTION].)
One other point on Tolkien: many tried to look at Lord of The Rings as a parable about World War 2 and/or nuclear weapons -- he disclaimed this, saying,
One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead.
I personally think his other purpose in writing was cathartic: by analogy to Dorothy L. Sayers, author of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries.[2]
Anyhow, my point about this and intuition is that people sometimes think a taste for the fantasy genre is indicative of intuition, becomes sensors must scorn anything not "realistic", but I don't witness any strong correlation there. The genre itself doesn't have a stronger tendency to expose what's behind the concrete layer of reality anymore than other genres (and arguably, some fantasy novels can do so even LESS), even if it has supernatural elements.
Preference that you keep it in thread, please.
To me, it's no surprise JKR types as an INFJ; in fact, it's almost a relief to see her self-typing rather than the espoused typing of INFP you see floating about on the interwebs. Her themes always carried too much dichotomy to feel like they originated from an NFP for me, lacking subtlety and very little reflection on the core, interwoven threads connecting human experiences. (Actually, despite my thematic misgivings, seeing her listed as INFP was at least a motivator that an INFP could actually manage to write umpteen books and get some shit done. So, back to the drawing board on that one lol!)
[MENTION=6561]OrangeAppled[/MENTION]:
I agree with this, very much so. The fantasy genre feels like the created world itself is more of the focus and the exploration of that world holds little appeal to me, unless highly consistent and imbued with a high degree of character depth. imo, fantasy generally yields little fruit on exploring the core themes of humanity and I find it generally simplistic, too literal and high in the use broad archetypes.
Science fiction strangely does a much better job in general at exploring the human condition.
Hi [MENTION=5999]PeaceBaby[/MENTION]. Kept in thread: but as you can see, it is something of a hijack. Sorry.
I wanted to completely agree with your comment that science fiction often does a much better job at exploring the human condition, with two provisos.
First, to my mind, Science Fiction can be a cross between what has been called "the beast fable" -- anthropomorphized talking creatures, allowing them to act in ways and present truths which would be unacceptable in a human -- and in some cases, medieval morality plays. This is because the either the science fiction involves alien races, cultures, histories, faiths, which open up the field to speculation, OR to proselytizing about such (hence my Tolkien quote about 'purposed domination of the author'). Too often I have disliked science fiction because I disagreed with the
ethos implanted in the world by the author, or he did a ham-handed job of making his points. Letting such things shine through organically, yet making them near enough the surface to be felt, and "for-the-sake-of-the-story-believeable" is a hard and delicate task...I suspect the more so as it is hard to craft and present an ethos unless one subscribes to it oneself.
Isaac Asimov attempted this -- veering once again, as [MENTION=6561]OrangeAppled[/MENTION] noticed, into social psychology, with his Lije Bailey / R. Daneel Olivaw in
The Caves of Steel and T
he Naked Sun; Poul Anderson did it *very* well with alien races in his Polyseotechnic Saga (
David Falkayn) -- and I note in googling for the spelling of those last words, that he wrote Time Travel novels based on Scandanavian legends: I must check those out.
[MENTION=6561]OrangeAppled[/MENTION], [MENTION=5999]PeaceBaby[/MENTION] -- in all this, can you suggest types for the following:
Norton Juster
C.S. Lewis
J.R.R. Tolkien
...and how on Earth is one supposed to categorize the Arthurian Legend?
[1] One is reminded of a line, btw, in one of C.S. Lewis's novels :
"But what about the other languages on Mars?"
"I admit I don't understand about them. One thing I do know, and I believe I could prove it on purely philological grounds. They are incomparably less ancient than Hressa-Hlab, especially Surnibur, the language of the Sorns. I believe it could be shown that Surnibur is, by Malacandrian standards, quite a modern development. I doubt if its birth can be put back farther than a date which would fall within our own Cambrian period."
[2] In her real life, Sayers had had a fling with, and had an illegitimate child by, what I guess today would be called a motorcycle gang member (this not withstanding her being one of the first women to graduate from Oxford, a celebrated Christian writer, and first-rate intellect)...there is a passage in one of her novels,
Gaudy Night, in which the heroine, a novelist, is discussing one of her novels with Wimsey:
“Well,†said Harriet, recovering her poise, “academically speaking, I admit that Wilfrid is the world’s worst goop. But if he doesn’t conceal the handkerchief, where’s my plot?â€
“Couldn’t you make Wilfrid one of those morbidly conscientious people, who have been brought up to think that anything pleasant must be wrong-so that, if he wants to believe the girl an angel of light she is, for that very reason, all the more likely to be guilty. Give him a puritanical father and a hellfire religion.â€
“Peter, that’s an idea.â€
“He has, you see, a gloomy conviction that love is sinful in itself, and that he can only purge himself by taking the young woman’s sins upon him and wallowing in vicarious suffering… He’d still be a goop, and a pathological goop, but he would be a bit more consistent.â€
“Yes-he’d be interesting. But if I give Wilfrid all those violent and lifelike feelings, he’ll throw the whole book out of balance.â€
“You would have to abandon the jig-saw kind of story and write a book about human beings for a change.â€
“I’m afraid to try that, Peter. It might go too near the bone.â€
“It might be the wisest thing you could do.â€
“Write it out and get rid of it?â€
“Yes.â€
“I’ll think about that. It would hurt like hell.â€
“What would that matter, if it made a good book?â€
She was taken aback, not by what he said, but by his saying it. She had never imagined that he regarded her work very seriously, and she had certainly not expected him to take this ruthless attitude about it. The protective male? He was being about as protective as a can-opener.